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THE NEW BRUNSWICK MAGAZINE.

on too small a scale, too much lacking in detail, and in some respects not sufficiently accurate to afford the information necessary to define with exactness the limits of a grant of 2,000 acres, even supposing the government had been disposed to be particular on this head. That there should have been a large over plus in the number of acres in the original grant was not particularly remarkable, and was by no means an exceptional circumstance in the grants of that period,[1] but the grantees were remarkably fortunate in not having the over plus struck off later on, and regranted to others.

As early as the year 1784, Elias Hardy, acting in the interests of the Loyalists, submitted to Governor Carleton a report on the grants supposed to be liable to escheat. Regarding the first grant to Simonds and White he says:—

"This grant is said to contain six or eight thousand acres, some of the conditions unperformed, as sowing hemp annually, etc. This grant must have originated in misrepresentation either in the application or survey, otherwise the quantity could not have been so much mistaken."

Ward Chipman having been requested by the Governor to collect the best information he could procure concerning all grants of land in New Brunswick liable to forfeiture and, more particularly, to investigate Mr. Hardy's list of grants supposed to be escheatable, reported as follows on the grant of 2,000 acres made to Simonds and White in 1765:—

"This land has never been actually surveyed but making allowance for lakes, sunken and broken ground, it is supposed not to contain much more (if any) than the number of acres mentioned in the Grant. The Grant was made in the year 1765 agreeable to the return of the surveyor, describing particularly the boundary lines and expressing them to be 'with allowance for bad lands, containing in the whole by estimation two thousand acres more or less', No misrepresentation can well be supposed
  1. ↑ Colonel Arthur Goold's grant just above the Oromocto, Charles Morris grant below Maugerville and Kemble's Manor, were found to have an unfair allowance of land, which in each case was struck off and regranted.
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